This collection of William Butler Yeats' love poetry begins with his youthful, romantic idealism. It follows with his disillusionment in middle age after Maud Gonne married John MacBride, and reflects the change in his poems to a more direct, austere, and forceful style. The collection combines much of the beauty he imparted to the Celtic Revival with his later outspoken, sardonic treatment of sexuality. In old age, notes A. Norman Jeffares (an authority on Yeats and Anglo-Irish poerty, who has produced two critical biographies of the poet), Yeats wrote with an increasing sense of urgency. Right up to his death, his love poems reflect the developing mind of a genius still capable of remaking himself.